...And That's The Way It Is (Back Then)

Walter Cronkite was lucky to live to 92, and even luckier to live when he did – at a time when everyone got their news from the same television station at the same time, and anchors were still required to be objective journalists. It didn’t matter if they wore glasses or spoke in a gravelly voice or appeared on TV in their sixties. Back then, it was OK to spend several minutes on a story to make sure viewers received all the facts, and the story never was influenced by ideologies or pressured by major advertisers.

If Walter was graduating today, he probably wouldn’t think of journalism as a career, and even if he did he would never be picked to anchor a local broadcast, let alone a national one. Too dour, people would say. Too much of a perfectionist. Walter is remembered today not so much for who he was, but what he represented. Some would say his editorial on Vietnam following the Tet Offensive was a switch from journalism to editorial, but to reach that conclusion he had the nerve to actually travel to Vietnam and find out the facts first. And when you watch him and listen to his voice, there is none of the condescension and taunting that flows from so many so-called news anchors and bloviators today. He spoke with absolute authority, for he had actually bothered to do his homework. The nerve of him.

Walter also had the politeness and the class to wait until he was retired (actually, forced into retirement) to begin making his true political feelings known. That was perfectly acceptable – he was no longer an anchor or journalist. I’m sure he was disappointed in many things concerning journalism and the media, especially the partisan sniping that masquerades as debate and the downfall of the once-mighty CBS News. But if I had the audacity to guess, I think what bothered him the most was both the move from reporting the news to editorializing the sensational and the trivial. President Obama recently said he was surprised the media made the recent “beer summit” the top story instead of the meeting he had with the president of the Philippines. He had to have been joking, but Cronkite would have said, “And right there…that’s why the mighty Fourth Estate has fallen.”